Salmond vents fury at bid to extend super-injunctions north of Gretna

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has gone on the warpath over Westminster proposals to extend the controversial super-injunction into Scotland – despite it possessing a different legal system.

Describing this system as a “pillar of Scottish nationhood” Salmond went on to claim that introducing so called gagging orders there was “deeply flawed”.

The furore follows the Sunday Herald’s decision to print a front page splash of Man U striker Ryan Giggs after he took out an injunction south of the border which had no legal status in Scotland.

That anomaly has prompted a Westminster committee to re-evaluate the balance between freedom of expression and right to privacy, leading to a report which calls for: “interim injunctions granted in one jurisdiction in the United Kingdom” to be “enforceable in the other two jurisdictions in the same way as final injunctions are.”

It would also accord equal application of the law to “print, broadcast and online” platforms.

Reacting to the plan in the Herald Salmond said: “Until we are independent it is vital that there is no more erosion of our legal autonomy – and this attempt to make so-called superinjunctions granted by an English court enforceable in Scotland would do just that.

"It is wrong-headed, deeply flawed and ultimately based on a profound misunderstanding by some Westminster politicians of Scotland's place in the legal fabric of the UK. Put bluntly, they simply do not understand, or want to understand, that Scotland is already a different, independent legal jurisdiction to England's.”